Control
by Shake The Disease
Summary: Simon's unrequieted feelings for Nathan have caused him to curdle in the brain department. Slash ensues.
1. Chapter 1

A/N: This story is basically AU and takes place sometime after s02e03. Will definitely contain slash. Rated T for the time being, but that may change.

Control

Simon had always known that one day, he would lose his mind. It was simply one of those grim inevitabilities, those sad and immovable facts of life. It had always been there, brewing in his blood; a sickness pulsing just beneath the surface, waiting to blossom into something alien and cold. He had been teetering on the brink of this for longer than he cared to remember, and although he had spent weary years anticipating this day with an almost blithe sense of resignation, he had to admit that it was nothing like he had expected, or hoped. He had thought that the earth would simply fall away from beneath his feet one day, that a great chasm would sigh open within him and swallow everything he had ever been and known and felt. He had imagined that he might find solace in the embrace of madness, shriven of guilt and responsibility, clean at last. Had he known the truth of the matter, he might not have welcomed it with such open arms. This was not freedom, but a new kind of paralysis. The terrain of his mind had not shifted at all; instead, it had hardened and crystallised. His thoughts still trickled relentlessly down the same old paths, the same fears and resentments still scraped maddeningly at the insides of his skull as he lay staring up at his bedroom ceiling with blank and unblinking eyes. The scars hadn't healed, they were only covered by new ones. The memories were all sat neatly in place, just as he had left them. He could feel every subtle twist and flicker of this strange new disease, but was powerless to stop it. He had finally come to realise that when you lose your mind, you don't actually lose anything of yourself at all. Everything stays precisely where it is - in fact, the world has never seemed so clear and so still. The only thing you lose is control.

He sat up, and gazed over at his own reflection. His face was ghastly pale in the dim light, shadows gathering in the hollows of his cheekbones. He had barely eaten in weeks, yet the deep groans of hunger had finally subsided, leaving a curious serenity in their wake. His body had almost come to resemble an instrument of torture - a battlefield of taut, cruel angles where the bones pressed up angrily against the skin - and he had spent most of the afternoon studying it in rapt silence, strangely hypnotised at how the slightest inhalation of breath caused his ribcage to grin out horribly through the luminous, paper-thin flesh of his torso. Never before had he felt like such a stranger in his own skin. Although admittedly the balance between body and mind had always been an uneasy one - for him, at least. Perhaps other people didn't feel it so keenly, didn't quietly resent their own physical imposition on space, didn't shy away from their most basic human instincts in fear and revulsion, or get lost for hours in their own haunted reflection while trying to make sense of it all. Gaining the power of invisibility had only intensified the conflict, the painful sense of dislocation, the visceral shudder of dread invoked by the slimy desires that came upon him without warning and held him at their mercy for long, sleepless hours. He had been powerless for as long as he could remember - a victim of his own perversion, full of aimless lust and impotent fury but with no means to articulate or escape it. And yet he had never felt more puissant, more alive, than in those first few weeks of his community service. For the first time in his life he had been given a chance to harness the demons that lived beneath his skin, to exert some modicum of control over others, over himself. But how it had come to this he couldn't quite imagine. There were certain pieces of the puzzle that simply wouldn't fit back together. All he knew was that at one point or another, something had gone horribly wrong. So many delicious possibilities had clustered suddenly before him that he had snapped under the weight of his elation. It was all to much. He had finally glimpsed the world in all it's voluptuousness, and it had blinded him forever. Perhaps it was some personal weakness on his part - he had merely sat back and watched as this foreign entity took root within his body and mind, as though desperate to return to a state of abject slavery. He had let it govern him without question, and now its alien heart beat in time with his own. He could no longer tell whether the impulses coursing through his veins were his own, or merely the product of this strange new sickness. In either case, it ended tonight. It _all _ended tonight.

He stood alone and invisible in the shambling rain, watching the last remains of daylight bleed away into a sky bruised black by the touch of thunder. The distant glimmer of lightning sugared the horizon, and cast the huge, haggard silhouette of the community centre into sharp relief. Simon waited in the shadows as he always did, ignoring the rain and the waspish wind clawing at his face, content for the moment to simply stand and stare blankly at his silent destination. It was a singularly ugly place, and yet the sight of it never failed to lift his spirits somehow. Since the early days of his community service, his feet had carried him here increasingly often after nightfall. At first he hadn't been able to explain it even to himself, hadn't known exactly what it was that drew him here time after time. But the truth of the matter had grown almost insultingly obvious as the weeks progressed; he could deny it no longer. It was Nathan. The mere thought of Nathan sitting alone somewhere in that bleak, echoing place, made his throat contract with a strange and nameless emotion. At times Simon thought he could hear the restless tapping of footsteps reverberating through the empty halls, and once or twice, on a clear night, he could almost feel soft, sleeping breaths suffusing the silence of the night, though it may have been his imagination. Simon had never ventured into the building by night, or seen any visible trace of his friend. It had always been enough simply to know that he was there, to watch over him from afar. But tonight, things were different. After a long moment's hesitation, he bowed his head and strode quietly across the rain-slick pavement until he came to the small side-entrance that he knew for a fact Nathan used by night and had never once bothered to lock. For weeks he had pictured himself standing before this very door, and carefully turning the handle. Now that it was finally happening, he didn't know quite how to feel. His breathing quickened, and as he stole into the building and made his way over to where he knew Nathan's makeshift bed was situated, his heart began to rattle madly in his chest like the wings of a caged bird.

The time had finally come.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2**

The dim, tarnished glow of the street-lights flooded in through the windows and sluiced the hall with its murky sheen. Though Simon couldn't see much of his surroundings, it became immediately apparent that Nathan was in the final throes of a particularly violent wank. Simon crept closer to the shuddering figure, deeply thankful that the mysterious laws of his power dictated that he became inaudible, as well as invisible, when he chose to be. Often it unnerved him - that sense of sliding helplessly away from the world to occupy a separate plane of existence, as though trapped on the other side of a mirror, gazing at the faces of his companions through a clear wall of glass - but at the present time his heart was pounding so fiercely that his teeth had begun to rattle to its tune, and his breaths were torn in ragged gusts from his lungs. It was imperative that Nathan was unaware of his presence, for now at least. Simon leaned in even further and carefully poised himself mere inches from Nathan, close enough to inhale his scent, mesmerised by the rhythmic jerking motions of his hand. It was over all too soon, and Simon's breath caught painfully in his throat as he watched Nathan's body stiffen and convulse. This was hardly the first time Simon had used his power for voyeuristic purposes; sometimes, during community service, he turned invisible for as much as fifteen minutes at a time (no one ever cared enough to notice) and simply followed Nathan about his business, shadowing his footsteps like a ghost. It _was_, however, the first time he had happened to stumble upon one of his masturbation sessions. Therefore, he was unprepared for the sight of Nathan casually wiping himself down afterwards with a very stiff and very sad-looking sock. For the first time in what seemed like years, a faint smile tugged at the corner of Simon's mouth. And then, without warning, the events of last week tumbled through his mind in a blinding flurry, and his expression soured.

He couldn't recall the exact moment when it had happened, but at some point in the past seven days, something inside him had withered and died. His eyes had hardened, and his blood had begun to run cold. All he knew for certain was that this time last week, Nathan had loved him. All his life Simon had dreamed of being so blindly and passionately adored - and since the day when Nathan had first exploded into his life, it had been painfully obvious that no one else would ever suffice. But he hadn't imagined that it would be so terrifying, to suddenly look into Nathan's eyes and see a yearning that mirrored his own. It had always been so easy in the midnight theatre of his just-before-sleep fantasies; he had always known exactly what to say, how to behave. He had always been in absolute control. Nathan's coarse and clumsy advances had left him horrified; not because he hadn't wanted to succumb, but because he had wanted it far too much. The sheer depth and weight of his own desire appalled him. It was beyond love, beyond infatuation. Whatever it was, it had caused him to slowly darken and decay until he was nothing more than a vessel for this aimless longing, empty of choice or volition. But an interesting realisation had dawned upon him as the sickness ate him alive: it was only as you started to peel back the carefully assembled mask of humanity that you realised just how little there was underneath it all. Strip away the layers, and you found nothing - no soul, no substance, just a constellation of obsessions, no more or less. Lust was the only thing that held him together now.

Nathan took a huge gulp of beer, slopping at least half of it down the front of his t-shirt. He was quite fantastically drunk, that much was obvious. Deciding that now was the time to finally set his plan into motion, Simon took a few steps back, hurriedly smoothing down his hair and wiping the film of cold sweat from his brow, and snapped back into visibility. Nathan jumped comically at the sudden sight of him.

"_Jesus_! Stop doing that you little freak!" Nathan squawked, sluicing himself in beer once again

Simon didn't respond, and merely stood gazing down coldly into Nathan's face - that face, which only last week had been transformed by wide-eyed adoration, now displayed only wry mockery. A smile flickered on Simon's lips. It was better this way, so much better. He no longer wanted to see Nathan smiling fondly back at him, or to hold him gently - he had no time for loving caresses and soft whispers - the very thought of it made him nauseous now. He wanted to violate every inch of Nathan's body and soul, to beat him down with as much violence and hatred as he could muster and crush him underfoot.

"Fuckin' hell Barry, what's up with you?" Nathan demanded. "You look even more constipated and unusual than you normally do."

"You were right, you know," Simon said. "I _am _a freak. I used to hate you for saying it, I didn't want to be that person. I thought everyone was just being unfair, picking on me to make themselves feel better. I thought I was the victim, but I'm not. There's a poison in me. They could sense it, even when I couldn't sense it myself. I see now that they were afraid. And I don't blame them, not at all."

"That was...a lovely story, man," Nathan responded hazily, obviously not listening. "Go and get me a beer from the kitchens will you? I'm all out." He shook his empty bottle and dropped it unceremoniously to the floor. Simon watched it roll off silently into the shadows.

"Empty. It's all empty, isn't it?" Simon murmured. "We're all just...adrift here. There are chasms between us. No one ever really touches anyone. We're all alone."

"Ah, don't worry Barry, you'll get laid one day," Nathan grunted, lying back on his grubby bed and staring up at the ceiling. "I mean, sure, you have the eyes of a sex-pest, and you kinda look like something Tim Burton drew on an off-day, but that's what drugged-up, one-eyed hookers are _for_, right? So anyway, how about that beer?"

"I'll be back before you know it," Simon answered quietly, retreating into the gloom.


End file.
